"Good morning." He came to his feet from the kitchen table, another pair of leather pants covering his muscular legs. His feet and chest were bare.
Grace stared at the broad, hairless chest, as she came to a sudden stop. She'd been wanting to see that
nipple ring she had glimpsed under his T-shirt. Now that she was seeing it, her mouth watered, her lips tingled with the need to capture it, to tug on it.
But as sexy as the sight of it was, nothing could detract from the thin white scars that crisscrossed his chest and abdomen.
He pulled a shirt from the back of the chair and shrugged it on, covering the horrific scars. They weren't thick and ridged, but they crisscrossed his flesh like a road map.
"Sorry about that." He turned away from her, walking across the cheerful, bright kitchen, buttoning the black shirt. "I made coffee."
She couldn't help it. Grace moved quickly across the room, facing him as he turned back to her.
"I have to see it," she whispered, her fingers going to the buttons of his shirt. "All of it, Matthias. You don't have the right to hide it from me now."
His hard, sharply defined features tightened, as her fingers undid the buttons of his shirt. She pushed the cotton shirt from his wide shoulders, and tossed it over a chair.
"Did he do this?" she whispered, her fingertips touching the evidence of the cruelty he had experienced. Some of the scars were older, almost invisible. Tough, darkly tinted flesh rippled under her touch, as he glared down at her.
"He enjoyed using the whip. The scientists needed to know under what conditions we couldn't fight or complete our objectives. We were put through a variety of simulations. Torture being the favorite of them all. If we didn't succeed in the objective given us, we died." Her breath hitched in her throat, as tears flooded her eyes. She followed the scars on his chest, his side, then moved around him to stare at his back.
"Oh, God, Matthias." The scarring was worse on his back. She leaned her forehead against his back, clenching her eyes tight at the incredible pain he must have endured.
"It doesn't hurt any longer, Grace," he assured her.
Grace lifted her head, her gaze going to his shoulders. On his left shoulder was the Breed marker. A genetic shadow of a paw print. Within that print, four blood-red teardrops had been tattooed into his flesh. Around the paw, a precise tattoo of what appeared to be dark smoke had been drawn, a single feather, tipped with blood, caught within it.
"Why this one?" She touched the bloodstained feather wrapped in wire.
"The price of submission," he growled.
"And this one?" A line of carefully disguised bones, wrapped in the same barbed wire, the wire twisting from the base of his spine to the middle of it.
"Friends who died for their freedom," he answered.
"And this?" She touched the blood red teardrops encased by smoke.
"The tattoo was made by a tribal medicine man. It's a protection symbol, to hold the evil within it from marking my soul." His voice was heavy, filled with pain.
"The teardrops are the evil?" She asked. "Why?"
"They mark each Council member I've killed."
Grace froze, her fingers trembling over the four markers.
"The larger one denotes a directorate member. The two medium-sized ones are scientists, the smallest are trainers. I don't bother to list the coyote soldiers, they aren't worth the need for protection." Disgust for those Breeds colored his voice.
"And Albrecht will add to it," she whispered. "What happens when you run out of room?"
"Then I return for another protected circle and begin again." His back tightened, as rage thrummed in his voice.
"And does it help the nightmares?" she asked, "or make them worse?" Matthias stared over the room, his soul bleak at the sound of her voice. He could hear the pain and compassion in her voice, the need to understand. And despite the blood that stained his hands, all he could think about was touching her.
"Sometimes, it stills the nightmares," he answered, as he turned to her. "And sometimes, they only grow worse."
His hands gripped her shoulders, the softness of the cotton hiding the warmth of her flesh from him.
"Would you stop?" she asked.
Matthias could see the hope in her eyes, the innocence. That innocence alternately lightened his soul and weighed it down. He had never meant for her to know what he was, he had thought he could keep that part of what he did hidden after he claimed her.
Because he couldn't stop.
"We have other things to discuss," he said, rather than answering her. "We need to discuss us ."
"There's no us , Matthias." The regret in her voice tore at him. "I won't report what I saw, but whatever we had is over."
She tried to move away from his touch. Despite the arousal he knew she felt, the tender feelings he knew hadn't died, still, she moved away from him.
Once she had come to him with a smile, her pretty eyes lighting up in pleasure. Now, her dove-gray eyes were dark and shadowed, knowing the truth of what he was.
"It doesn't work that way." He had to tell her the truth. He couldn't force her into the mating, as much as he wanted to. He couldn't pull her into it without her knowledge.
"Of course it works that way." Her lips turned down in a sad smile. "I decide who I sleep with."
"The mating changes that." He kept his voice low, gentle. "You can never just walk away now."
"Watch me." She tried to pull away again.
"How many nights can you handle, without me in your bed?" He asked as his grip tightened on her shoulders. "Without my touch? It's been building since the night we met, the need to touch, to kiss, to lie beneath me. Admit it."
"Once you're gone, I'll get over it." The confidence in her eyes was overshadowed by her arousal. Matthias continued to touch her, his hands moving over her arms, sliding the robe past her shoulders, touching her bare skin, his fingertips lingering to relish the feel of warm silk.
"It won't go away, it will be there. It will become worse some nights, easier others, because we've never kissed. Because my lips haven't touched your flesh. But you'll never be free of it." He watched the suspicion grow in her eyes.
"You're trying to frighten me," she chided, her lips trembling now.
"No, I'm trying to be honest," he said. "You laughed about the tabloid stories, the Breed community sneers at them, but there's truth to some of them, Grace. There's a bond, a hormonal, biological bond once a Breed comes in contact with his mate. It doesn't go away. It doesn't lessen"
"No." She shook her head desperately. "That's not possible."
"There are small glands at the side of my tongue. They fill with a very powerful hormone once the mating begins. It takes no more than a lick on your flesh to make you burn. A kiss will turn you inside out with the need to be fucked. Eventually, the fires burn so hot and so desperate, that nothing matters but easing the hunger twisting inside you. How long it lasts depends on each couple. But it never completely goes away. In each case, though, there is love. There is emotion to make the bonds created endurable. It only occurs between a couple that would have loved, despite the heat." He watched her pale. Her small hands flattened on his sweat-dampened chest. He was already burning for her. The glands in his tongue had become fully engorged the night before, and already the hormone was spilling into his system.
"Let me go, Matthias."
"Listen to me, Grace. You were loving me, I know you were, before last night."
"Last night changes everything," she cried out, her expression fraught with fear. "Let me go." He released her, feeling the damning sorrow that weighed at his soul, as she put the length of the room between them.
She stared at the palms of her hands before wiping them on her gown, staring back at him in disbelief. Her gaze flickered from his face to his thighs, then back again.
"How long have you known about this reaction? That it could happen between us?" She asked.
"Since the beginning," he answered her honestly. "The night of the mugging, when I touched you, when I wiped the tears from beneath your eyes, I could feel something inside me shifting, changing. Within a week, I could feel the itch in my tongue, the arousal that wouldn't abate. I knew then." He had known even before then that she would hold his heart. Months he had spent watching her, investigating her, learning things about her that softened him toward her. She was a good woman. Loyal. Honest. She worked hard, she had friends, and she often went out of her way to do good things for them. Taking them soup when they were ill, visiting them in the hospital. Late nights on the phone, when one of them lost a lover.
"God, you infected me with something." She was staring back at him in horror. Hell, he should have just kissed her and let nature take care of it.
"Not fully." He finally shrugged. "But I will, before this week is out." His muscles tightened in determination. "You are my mate, Grace. I won't let you just walk away from me. No other woman will ever be as important to my soul. No other woman will ever bring me the pleasure you do, with just your smile. And you know you will never forget how I make you feel. You know it." She was shaking her head desperately. "You can't do this to me! I won't let you."
"I can't control it," he said. "Tell your body it can't happen. Tell your heart you don't care. By God, Grace, fix it and then tell me how you've done it, and I'll let you go. Until then, I can't walk away, because it would rip my soul from my body to do so."
"You don't love me," she cried.
"I cherish you," he growled. "But even more than that, for once in my misbegotten life, I have a chance at real freedom, and you're it. The chance to be more than the animal I was created to be. With my mate, I can be a husband, a father"
Grace flinched at the sound of his voice when he said the words husband and father . He softened, a sense of wonder flashing in his eyes. He stared at her as though she meant something, as though she were important, as though she held his soul.
That look overrode her horror at what he was telling her. It diluted her anger. And nothing should have been able to dilute her anger.
"You knew all along. That's why you made me fall in love with you," she accused him, trying to hang on to the fury. "You deliberately made me care for you."
He pulled his shirt back on, though he didn't button it.
"Only because I cared as well," he stated, his voice rough. "All my life I've had to hold back. I've had to force myself to care for no one, because I knew they would suffer for my emotions. Once I escaped the labs, that restraint was so much a part of me that even forming friendships has been difficult. Until you." He shook his head, his dark gold eyes locked on her. "You gave me a chance to know what I've been missing all my life, Grace. You still the fury inside me, and you made me hope there was more to my life than the constant battle for freedom. You made me love you. Why shouldn't I respond in kind?" She had hoped he would love her. She had teased him, she had tempted him, she had done everything to draw him into a touch, a kiss. She had laughed with him, and knowing he was a Breed, tried to show him a softer, gentler side of life. She had set out to bind him to her, believing this scarred, shadowed wolf she was coming to love needed her.
And maybe he did, in more ways than she knew. But he was a killer, wasn't he? He had taken Albrecht's life without remorse, hadn't he? Or had he?
The blood red teardrops on his shoulder told another story. Teardrops, a sign of pain and regret. They told a story she knew he would never admit to. Teardrops denoted sorrow, blood red teardrops, grief. She wondered if he even realized the grief that lurked in his gaze, and in his soul?